4. Foster talks about the relationship
between the reader and the writer suggesting that, “reading is an event of the
imagination…a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence
engaging another (the writer’s). How does this occur? What does
this suggest about the nature and process of reading and writing?
When an
author creates a story it is their own personal experiences and thoughts poured
out onto a page generating a story filled with the writer’s own imagination.
This imagination that Foster refers to facilitates the interaction between the
writer and the reader’s thoughts mixed with the writer’s intent. How to break
this process down into simpler terms would be as described as a conversation while
having to pick up on someone’s body language. There is a form of underlying
communication that comes from the way people use expressions and motions this
concept can be translated to be thought of as the writer’s symbolism in the
text. In many cases people in conversations are better than others at picking
up on these signals but that doesn’t mean they still can’t understand the
intended message. The writer and the reader are in this situation of trying to
convey thoughts through pages which can be confusing for both parties involved.
This idea suggests that interpreting others creative thoughts can be difficult
depending upon their own life experiences and personal thoughts.
Foster uses
an analogy early on in the book to describe how texts intertwine with each
other by explaining how they are like eels swimming around in a barrel. He uses
this to describe how stories are similar to one another but I think this also
goes for showing how the author’s thoughts intertwine with the reader’s
creative thoughts as well. Both factors create a story that is personal. The act
of reading isn’t something that can ever be generic or standardized. Even with
the simplest of stories people will still paint different mental images of
characters and plot lines. The interaction between the author and the reader is
something that is different for everyone and cannot be containerized to fit on
kind of interpretation which is one of the biggest tings to remember when
discussing Foster’s description of the interaction between author and reader.
I agree that reading a story is similar to having a conversation with an author. The author has communicated his/her thoughts through the evens and characters of the story, and the reader will, hopefully, be able to decipher what the author is saying. The twist is that a story can not change while you read it, so the conversation is one sided. This a hurdle on the path to testing literature “like a professor”.
ReplyDeleteResponse to Blog Response to Prompt #4
ReplyDeleteKelli, you have great points here and you have done an amazing job of communicating how the audiences ambiguity shapes the text. Through Foster’s lessons, I have learned that there is so much ambiguity in literature and this does not exclude the author. The author works as an artist and a businessman. Any given author is attempting to creatively express their own personal experiences or storyline while remaining relatable, even marketable. There are many cases in which some of the most famous authors and/or artists weren’t even acknowledged, purchased within their lifetime because their views, comments did not align with historical or societal context.
Anastasia Jones-Burdick